Introduction and background:

Hi! My (artist) name is peepsie (real name Patrick), I'm 18 years old and I've been making my own music since the age of around 11 if we're being pedantic. Whether it's on my phone in GarageBand, a browser tab in Beepbox, or on my computer using Ableton (what I use currently), I've always had a thing for making music - whether I knew it or not. I'm from the north of England near a city called Lancaster - not counting my Irish heritage - and my artist name is just a nickname my parents gave me. I guess it's stuck? What led me here was an amazing music teacher in primary school who inspired me to eventually pursue music like this - I hope he likes it!

Musical identity:

Music for me has been a very personal way of expressing myself. For a while I found it hard to underpin who exactly I sounded like since I just make things that come straight out of my mind. That might sound a bit patronising, sorry, and I think I have figured it out - Gorillaz and trip-hop in general, combined with EDM production and percussion, as well as the earworms and plucky sine waves of synthpop, is what you might get out of my music. My voice is a very sort of Rex Orange County crooning - not too over the top but a nice compliment to the instrumentals, which I feel reflects another half my personality, alongside the creative and sprawling synths.

My creative process is very weird, I have to say - it either starts with a drum loop or a chord progression that I like, and then I'm rolling from there. Sometimes I write the lyrics first, others it's a melody that's come to me in the shower. One constant is that my version of Ableton only supports 8 tracks (alongside other limitations), meaning I have to export my entire project before putting vocal tracks on top of that, Beatles 8-track-recorder style. A bit annoying but we make do!

Current work:

My latest release is a single called Keep Up. I wrote the lyrics after coming off of a 3 hour phone call with my now-girlfriend, which ended at like 3am? This was our second call by the way. Madness. It made me think - all of this has moved so fast, I'm in such a new field, I've never felt like this before - this is scary! But somehow, it feels nice. Knowing you're loved and being able to love them back is a good feeling imho. If you agree this song is for you. If you're sad you haven't felt it yet, it's also for you - it will happen trust me. If you're in a different situation, then I'm sorry, but also this might be for you.

One challenge I did have was with those pesky drums. I had to low-pass filter the main kick to give it the right sound, and balancing that with cutting the transients in the top drums was a pretty Sisyphean task at first. The sidechained, pulsy synth at the start is a happy accident, though. I exported the song as separate tracks, and muted the intro drums. I thought it helped the build up more, which is what you need in my kind of music. Overall, I'm really proud of how it came out - that vocal hook is pretty good by my standards - and the lyrics convey what I wanted them to in a pretty nice fashion.

Promotion & engagement:

I have literally just started, but all of my feedback comes from spreading around my work at my school, with my friends and family, and then seeing what they do with it. The response has been amazing so far - echo-chambers tend to be nice after all - but seeing them spread it around to their friends and other people I've never heard of has been really inspiring. Plus, algorithm-wise, repeat listeners, e.g. people who are close to you, are really, really important - and I've had quite a few of those.

The future holds a lot music wise - I've worked in the past with a local Lancastrian band called The Zoffs on a remix for their song 'Mayfly', from their album As Above So Below - safe to say they loved it! So much so that my new remix for an upcoming single of theirs should be coming out sometime this April or May.

I do most communication through my Instagram page @peepsie.music, since I am a one-man operation and I still have a life. Who knows? That might change soon.

Thank you so much!!